Post by LSuperSonicQ on Apr 4, 2023 23:07:10 GMT
I came across a newly written article for this topic and it piqued my interest, so I thought making a thread for discussion about it would be useful. I used to watch Pawn Stars growing up and think it would be cool to uncover more content for the show.
The article about the topic is here but to summarize it, there are rumors that in 2001, PBS produced a documentary about the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop that is completely lost. This documentary would be the earliest TV appearance of the shop and predates the well known segment from Dave Attell's show in 2003. However, what's most interesting about this documentary is that there seems to be very little evidence that it exists.
Apparently the claim that it exists is from a 2012 Huffington Post article where the documentary is mentioned, and that they got the information from a separate index of articles. But if you looking into that index, there's nothing in it that mentions this PBS documentary. So it's like Huffington Post made it up and didn't actually site a source.
But this is where things get really interesting and my main reason for making the thread. The Huffington Post article mentions a quote from Rick where he states, "I've always been a media whore" but this quote cannot be found anywhere else online outside of this article. That in itself is highly suspicious, but the Lost Media Wiki article speculates that it might have come from a 2011 GIA Symposium- but that too is lost.
You'd think something like a discussion panel would have been recorded by someone, so I tried to locate of a copy of it and that's when I found this article- news.centurionjewelry.com/articles/detail/exclusive-pawn-star-rick-harrison-tells-centurion-be-different
It's an article that was written about Rick speaking at the GIA Symposium but what's more important is the date of June 2011. This is the earliest known reference to the PBS documentary that I could find, meaning the Huffington Post article can basically be tossed out as they could have just taken the information from this one.
But that raises the question, where did this article get their information from? From the looks of it, they either had a copy of the event that they watched and took quotes from or had someone at the event take notes. There's an "exclusive video" of someone asking Rick a question at the event so I would trust this information a little more heavily than anything else since it's somewhat of a primary source.
The existence of the PBS Documentary is up for debate but the points to consider include:
-Where The Centurion article got their information from
-If there exists another source that predates The Centurion article (June 2011)
-A copy of the Symposium to look through for mentions of the documentary or accuracy of quotes
I also did look briefly on PBS' website on the Wayback Machine to see if there were any mentions or listings of it but I didn't find any. But if it was released as part of a specific documentary series or had an unexpected title, I wouldn't have expected it to be there. It's also very possible that the mention of a PBS documentary is some kind of misunderstanding or misremembering over the years that's been passed around so heavily it's been taken as fact. But as a researcher I would like to know what the source of that information was and when exactly the information became inaccurate.
The article about the topic is here but to summarize it, there are rumors that in 2001, PBS produced a documentary about the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop that is completely lost. This documentary would be the earliest TV appearance of the shop and predates the well known segment from Dave Attell's show in 2003. However, what's most interesting about this documentary is that there seems to be very little evidence that it exists.
Apparently the claim that it exists is from a 2012 Huffington Post article where the documentary is mentioned, and that they got the information from a separate index of articles. But if you looking into that index, there's nothing in it that mentions this PBS documentary. So it's like Huffington Post made it up and didn't actually site a source.
But this is where things get really interesting and my main reason for making the thread. The Huffington Post article mentions a quote from Rick where he states, "I've always been a media whore" but this quote cannot be found anywhere else online outside of this article. That in itself is highly suspicious, but the Lost Media Wiki article speculates that it might have come from a 2011 GIA Symposium- but that too is lost.
You'd think something like a discussion panel would have been recorded by someone, so I tried to locate of a copy of it and that's when I found this article- news.centurionjewelry.com/articles/detail/exclusive-pawn-star-rick-harrison-tells-centurion-be-different
It's an article that was written about Rick speaking at the GIA Symposium but what's more important is the date of June 2011. This is the earliest known reference to the PBS documentary that I could find, meaning the Huffington Post article can basically be tossed out as they could have just taken the information from this one.
But that raises the question, where did this article get their information from? From the looks of it, they either had a copy of the event that they watched and took quotes from or had someone at the event take notes. There's an "exclusive video" of someone asking Rick a question at the event so I would trust this information a little more heavily than anything else since it's somewhat of a primary source.
The existence of the PBS Documentary is up for debate but the points to consider include:
-Where The Centurion article got their information from
-If there exists another source that predates The Centurion article (June 2011)
-A copy of the Symposium to look through for mentions of the documentary or accuracy of quotes
I also did look briefly on PBS' website on the Wayback Machine to see if there were any mentions or listings of it but I didn't find any. But if it was released as part of a specific documentary series or had an unexpected title, I wouldn't have expected it to be there. It's also very possible that the mention of a PBS documentary is some kind of misunderstanding or misremembering over the years that's been passed around so heavily it's been taken as fact. But as a researcher I would like to know what the source of that information was and when exactly the information became inaccurate.
